PROJECT HEC Montréal Hélène-Desmarais Building, Montreal, Quebec
ARCHITECT Provencher_Roy
TEXT Olivier Vallerand
PHOTOS Ema Peter
Montreal-based Provencher_Roy has long demonstrated its aptitude for creating dynamic education facilities and university buildings, dating back to one of their breakthrough projects, UQAM’s J.-A.-De Sève building (1998). The lessons learned from this wealth of work are brightly visible in the Hélène-Desmarais Building, the new centre for Montreal’s post-secondary business school, HEC, in the heart of the city’s commercial core.
Led by then-partner Alain Compéra, Anne Rouaud, and Gerardo Pérez, the architect team transformed an odd-shaped downtown site into a building that feels at once intimate and on-brand with HEC’s executive-oriented profile. The design takes inspiration from HEC’s role as an early-twentieth-century institution of the primarily French-speaking side of downtown: in 2000, its original building on Square Viger was transformed in the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec’s Archives Centre, by Dan Hanganu and Provencher_Roy. Since that time, the institution has operated from two buildings at the Université de Montréal campus, on the other side of the mountain—a Brutalist one designed by Roland Dumais and recently renovated by Provencher_Roy, the other a new-build by Dan Hanganu and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. The new space repositions the school closer to the economic centre of the city, in a historic setting neighbouring Saint Patrick’s Basilica.
The design process built on models of collaborative learning and experimentation developed by the business school itself, which HEC had iteratively explored in its previous buildings. Working in collaboration with HEC research group Mosaic, Provencher_Roy undertook a co-design process that included a full-day workshop with HEC faculty and students, neighbours (including church members), heritage experts and creative professionals, followed by regular discussions with these groups. This process allowed the team to understand neighbours’ fears about the occupation of an empty space owned by the basilica. They worked closely with stakeholders, as well as with engineers, city staff, and government representatives, to develop a shared framework and vision for a contemporary addition to the city that would be integrated in the urban fabric.
The building occupies a comb-shaped site created by the combination of land ceded by the church and two privately owned lots. Throughout the design process, the team had to adjust their design, as HEC didn’t know which private owners would accept to sell their lots. Reacting to the building’s siting—anchored in the heart of a city block—the team imagined it as forming a campus with the basilica to the north, at the top of the comb. The teeth of the comb, popping out onto Beaver Hall, mask the service sides of adjacent buildings. A planned next phase of the lot redevelopment will redesign the basilica’s forecourt, resulting in better connections to both the new HEC building and De la Gauchetière Street.
To further complicate the design, the site sits on a steep slope, with nearly nine metres (two full floors) of height difference between De
la Gauchetière to the east of the building and René-Lévesque Boulevard to the west. This is negotiated by introducing a main circulation axis that steps up from De la Gauchetière, dividing the overall massing of the building into two sections. These volumes were further refined by thinking of the roof as a fifth façade, visible from the tall buildings surrounding it. Mechanical elements are carefully screened, and the top of the facility treated as a landscape of green roofs and terraces accessible from different floors. More shaping occurred in response to the Church’s requests that views be protected, and neighbours’ access across the site preserved. The resulting sculptural form creates a diversity of viewpoints and experiences both inside and outside. This renders it impossible to fully comprehend the building at a glance—and yet, easily understandable as one circulates through it.
The interior clarity is achieved by two horizontal circulation axes. These visually connect the interior to the city, and provide for clear views of the vertically stacked program elements: a restaurant on the lower floor, conference and lecture rooms above, followed by classrooms, floors dedicated to continuing education, and foundation and administration offices at the top. Throughout the building, circulation areas and informal collaborative working spaces are positioned along the façades. The composition is anchored by a monumental stair on the first floors, connecting to a more contained sculptural stair on the upper floors. Contrasting black and white walls on each side of the feature stair subtly divide the space. This constellation of events and nodes, all consistently linked to views of the city, make wayfinding easy, despite the building’s unusual shape.
Walking through all the informal working spaces is enough to make anyone jealous of HEC students—even before going into the classrooms. These are carefully planned, based on many years of experimentation in HEC’s other buildings, and informed by lessons learned during the Covid disruptions. The classrooms and formal meeting spaces integrate hybrid teaching and collaborative tools, including webcams and screens on every wall of many rooms. U-shaped fixed configurations and modular tables allow for close interaction between teachers and students. In addition to a traditional 300-seat main auditorium with glazed walls to the circulation spaces, the building includes a “deconstructed” auditorium designed to teach entrepreneurial communication skills, mimicking situations in which students might be asked to work during their professional careers.
Throughout the building, shiny stretched ceilings and mirrored walls provide a visual sense of expansiveness. Fritted glass similarly creates continuity between walls and façades on the white side of the building. The fritted glass doubles as passive shading, playing a role in the building’s energy efficiency strategy—an important requirement from HEC even before the adoption of the most recent building code, with its more stringent energy-savings measures. Instead of curtain walls, highly insulated composite walls were designed and prototyped; the resulting modular system helped with the rationalization and constructability of the building’s sculptural form. A geothermal system results in smaller mechanical equipment needs, increasing the accessible areas of the building’s roofscape.
Subtle gestures are integrated throughout, connecting with both the history of the site and of the institution. For instance, maple links the new building to HEC’s other facilities in Montreal. Trees from the site, which had to be removed during construction, were reused in furniture for the facility. Outdoor furnishings were designed using stones from the former St. Bridget shelter, a building demolished in the late 1970s, whose foundations are inscribed on the ground floor of the new building.
Provencher_Roy’s site-responsive design promises to become, with time, a central meeting point for the Montreal business community, and an important chapter in the school’s proud architectural history. Once again, HEC teaches here the importance of investing in architecture: both for fostering the collaborations that are at the heart of business, and for expressing the institution’s longstanding role as a civic leader.
Olivier Vallerand is an Associate Professor at the École de design, Université de Montréal.
CLIENT HEC Montréal | ARCHITECT TEAM Alain Compéra (FIRAC), Anne Rouaud, Gerardo Pérez, Claude Provencher (FIRAC), Henry Cho, Jonathan Bélisle, Olivier Chabot, Guillaume Martel-Trudel | STRUCTURAL/CIVIL Consortium SDK/MHA | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Pageau Morel/Bouthillette Parizeau in Consortium | LANDSCAPE Provencher_Roy | INTERIORS Provencher_Roy | WAYFINDING Arium Design | PROJECT MANAGER WSP Canada | CONTRACTOR Magil Construction | AREA 24,000 m2 | BUDGET $160 M | COMPLETION September 2023
ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 105.5 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.46 m3/m2/year
As appeared in the September 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine